Many devices are known for automatically feeding sheet material in various forms into an envelope to form a mail package. A typical apparatus might take the form of a folder/inserter, wherein one or more sheets of printed paper are collated, folded and then fed into a waiting envelope. The envelope is supplied from another machine location to a waiting position where it is held open and awaits receipt of the folded sheet material thereinto. The envelope containing the folded sheets is then subsequently automatically sealed and ejected from the machine into a receiving bin or tray.
Traditionally, the use of such folder/inserter machines has been dominated by large organizations, for instance banks, utilities companies and Governments, who require a means for producing a large number of mailpieces addressed to specific individuals and each containing unique printed material therein, potentially private to the recipient. Machines employed for these purposes are typically extremely large, and operate at a very high throughput, i.e. they produce mailshots potentially comprising hundreds of thousands of individually-addressed mailpieces in a short amount of time. Organizations having a national or international audience might need to produce hundreds of thousands of such mailpieces in a single day.
However, folder/inserter machines are rapidly becoming more widely accepted amongst medium and small-sized businesses. Such businesses still require the capacity to produce a large amount of outgoing mail, but to a smaller audience. Further, such businesses are incapable of affording the associated costs of running and operating a highly complex mailing apparatus of the type described above. Instead, folder/inserter machines of reduced complexity, and of a size suitable for SOHO (small office/home office) operation have been developed. Such machines are typically capable of producing mailshots comprising from a few hundred to one or two thousand mailpieces. These machines must be able to readily accept paper in the size and format typically used within an office environment, and similarly must be able to store and fill envelopes of the types most commonly used in the SOHO environment. Therefore, a folder/inserter for the SOHO environment will typically have an envelope feeding mechanism capable of storing several hundred envelopes in a stack. These envelopes are subsequently fed to a feeder/separator which separates a single envelope from the stack and feeds it to a waiting position where the envelope is held open and the desired printed material is inserted thereinto.
Typically envelope feeders comprise a platform which can be raised and lowered. A plurality of envelopes are placed on the platform. In operation, the platform is raised to bring the top envelope in the stack to a position from which the top envelope in the stack is fed into a feeder/separator mechanism, and subsequently through the folder/inserter apparatus, as described above. With a conventional envelope feeding means, more than one envelope is fed to the separator from the top of the stack. The separator then ensures that envelopes are fed individually into the machine, whilst the remaining few envelopes are left in the inlet area of the separator. Thus, when the feeding operation is stopped, one or more envelopes may remain at the inlet to the separator. If the platform is then lowered, for example to replenish the stock of envelopes in the stack, these envelopes remaining at the inlet to the separator will typically hang down into the region of the runway along which the platform is raised and lowered, thereby obstructing raising of the platform.
In known prior art devices, the operator replenishing the supply of envelopes is then required to remove by hand these envelopes remaining at the inlet to the feeder/separator before normal feeding can resume. This represents an inconvenience to the operator, reduces the efficiency of operating the feeder/inserter apparatus, and may even lead to jams when the envelopes are not correctly removed.